


clean up crew

by Metronomeblue



Series: imagine me & you- forever [16]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, F/M, Human/Vampire Relationship, Vampire AU, they’re not together yet but they’re in the amorphous zone before being together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-22 16:56:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17063513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metronomeblue/pseuds/Metronomeblue
Summary: “Can I use your shower?” It was a courtesy, her asking. She knew the answer would be yes.(Momo is a vampire who is also occasionally Kensei’s unexpected houseguest)





	clean up crew

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guess what I have a bunch of one-shots for this vampire AU and I’ve got to start posting them here because tumblr hates me and everyone else who enjoys nsfw content

Kensei looked down on the wide, red puddle soaking into the towel. He’d just put it down and already it was scarlet. It was brand new. It would be going into the apartment dumpster before tomorrow night. He was going to have to mop the floors again. Probably clean a rug or two, too. Momo wasn’t always neat after a job. Before, yes. During, impeccably. After? After, when the blood was clinging to her skin and tongue and hands, after, when everything in her screamed more, more, more- after, she tended to stumble back to humanity in a slow, hazy fashion. She’d been halfway there when she reached Kensei’s door, enough to knock and wait, silent and still, for him to come to the front of his apartment.

“Hinamori.” He hadn’t been surprised. He hadn’t been pleased, exactly, but he hadn’t been surprised. Her eyes were still wide, pupils dilated and irises a burnished ruby. Her mouth dripped blood. Her clothes dripped blood. There was a long trail of footsteps down the hall, but that could be passed off as something else if he was clever. And Kensei was clever, despite occasional appearances otherwise. He looked at her again, and the stillness of her small, serious face made him pause. “Hinamori,” he tried, reaching for her. She blinked, looked over at him. His hand was held fast in hers. 

“Kensei.” She blinked again, and took a full, false breath. She didn’t have to breathe, not when she was immersed in bloodlust, anyway, but it was habitual for most vampires. She nodded, letting go of his hand and smiling quickly, just as false. “Sorry.”

“Not sure you are,” he murmured, stepping back through the door, leading her by her hand around his wrist. “You should come in.”

“I should,” she agreed, though there was a pause before she did. Her eyes were still bright, still dark with thirst and the thrill of the hunt. If he was moving any faster, he knew she’d be more than tempted to chase. He looked her up and down again, eyes catching on the silver burned down her neck. There was a flicker of some feeling in him, fierce and wide, pressing out of his chest like it meant to snap his ribs.

“You need my help?” She shook her head and let go of his wrist.

“Sorry,” she said again, almost automatic, her mind so far away he shuddered to imagine what it was fixed on. She opened her mouth, and Kensei shook his head. He didn’t ask, he never asked, but she’d explain in some effort to calm him. He was already calm.

“I don’t want to know.” 

“I was doing business,” she offered emotionlessly. Kensei blinked back at her, sighing. “Official business.” 

“I said I didn’t want to know,” he reminded her, finally turning away to pull towels from the cabinet behind him. They soaked up the blood quickly, soft blues and clean white and soothing greens quickly turning a rusty red. 

“You say a lot of things,” Momo murmured, lifting her feet one at a time so he could slide one under her. “I’m not sure which ones you mean.”

Kensei paused, hands pressing down on a towel, the blood seeping up around his fingers. “Most of them.”

“Can I use your shower?” It was a courtesy, her asking. She knew the answer would be yes. It usually was. 

“Just rinse off the blood on the walls after,” Kensei said, looking up at her from the corner of his eye. “I don’t enjoy the reminder.” She nodded, empty of feeling.

She padded into his bathroom, long familiar, and he stared blankly at the red fabric on the floor for another couple of minutes before she pushed her bloody clothes into the hall for him. He threw them into a garbage bag with the towels.

He kept her clean clothes in a drawer in his dresser. Hidden neatly behind his own, packed tightly and folded neatly, where nobody would think to find them. She put a new set there, every time she dropped by covered in blood and full of thirst, and he became familiar with them over time. He liked to open the drawer from time to time and see them still there, reminding himself of her tangible existence. Once, she’d left a yellow dress there for two months. He missed it, in a way. It was cute. He was sure it had met a gruesome end at some point. 

He heard the water stop. Momo didn’t take very long. She never did, no matter how bloodsoaked she came in. It was always a little startling to hear the spray end after only a few minutes, but Kensei supposed that came from years of cleaning blood off of herself. Maybe it was just how she was. It was hard to imagine her ever being different. The faintest image persisted, though, replaying in his head. Momo, so much younger in the darkness, frantically washing blood from her hands in some river, some stream, some lake. Afraid, uncertain. Young. He stared down into his drawer, lost in thought, and it was only her voice that startled him out of it.

“Something worth thinking about in my socks?” She asked, and Kensei looked up to see her standing in the doorway. She still looked young, in surface ways. The large doe eyes, the soft cheeks, the way her hair fell around her face. But the same eyes looked back with ageless experience, her hands firm and certain in any task, those same cheeks creasing easily with an old, bitter smile whenever someone commented on her sweet face. She wasn’t young anymore. He wasn’t sure she ever had been.

“Just wondering how you’re always so fast,” he admitted, tossing her the bundle of clean clothes. “Shouldn’t it take you just a little longer to wash off the blood of a couple dozen dead?”

“Only fifteen people, this time,” she corrected him, and he was relieved by the touch of smile in her mouth. “And no. Not if you’re good at it.”

“And you’re good?”

She smiled, and said nothing. Kensei shook his head, smiling, and turned away to fall into his bed.

“Am I exhausting you?” She asked wryly, and he could hear the rustle of clothing, the shifting of weight on his old wooden floor, the small movements of a predator relaxed. 

“No,” Kensei admitted, rolling onto his back. “You do worry me from time to time, though.”

“You don’t have to worry,” she said, but her voice was soft. Her denial was quiet, turned back by her gratitude, and he frowned.

”I do,” he told her, staring heavily at her back. 

“Are you expecting an argument?” She turned around, fully dressed. Her eyes bored into his, challenging, and he shrugged. “Kensei-“

“You’re my friend,” he said. “You come to my house at all hours, months apart, covered in blood. I rarely see you otherwise. I don’t even know you’re alive half the time.”

“If I was dead, you’d know,” she told him, in a tone from which he could infer this was meant as a reassurance. “You’d definitely know.”

“I’m more worried than before,” he told her dryly.

“Don’t be,” Momo looked at him, narrow-eyed. “Killing fifteen people for committing treason in the King’s home is an above board job these days.” Kensei stared back, unswayed. She looked away, finally. “Nobody’s going to follow me here.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.”

“Kensei-“

“Please.” She looked at him, one hand outstretched to her, face tight but tired. Her voice died in her throat, and she moved forward to sit on the bed beside him.

“Don’t worry,” she told him. He reached up to push hair from her face, but she was too far away. She leaned in, then let herself curl over him, resting heavily over his lap. He waited, and when she didn’t move, he sat up, leaning back against the headboard. He reached for her again, and his fingers moved gently through her hair, a warm comb that pulled hair from her face and passed softly over the dark, drying mass that splayed back over his thighs.

“I asked you not to involve me,” he said, but his hand kept moving over her hair, regular, soft strokes that kept her suspended between cold sleep and blurry wakefulness.

“I know,” she said, just as lowly, just as unconcerned. “I am sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“You’re confusing,” Momo sighed, turning just a little more into his touch, soaking up the warmth on her cool skin. 

“I’m confusing?” He smiled, and it felt foreign but good. “I’m nothing compared to you.”

“I’m an open book.”

“Mm. Sure you are.” There was a long silence, slow and drowsy, the warmth of him held in by her body on his. His hands rested loosely curled, wrists laid over his hips and his fingers over her forehead.

“There’s a hole in me,” Momo said quietly, suddenly, as if she felt the need to explain something. “And you fill it.” Kensei looked down at her still face- too still, inhumanly still, like a corpse- and took this in. She cracked one eye open, and tilted her head so she could see his face. He uncurled one finger from the hand dangling over her forehead and swept the stray lock of hair from her face.

“DIdn’t know there was a hole to fill,” he said fondly, a touch of a smile crossing his face. She rolled her eyes and let them close again, settling more fully into his lap. Her whole body was cool, and heavy enough that she weighed him down. He felt calm, here, steady. He felt himself drift, but shook sleep away when the sun began to rise. “Hey,” he murmured, laying a hand on her shoulder. “Hinamori.” She didn’t shift, and he sighed. 

He moved forward, turning her body so she lay over his lap, and lifted her easily. She was heavy for a vampire, more solid, even though she was as bird-boned and empty-veined as any of them, and he felt curiously as if he was carrying something made of metal, porcelain or glass or stone. Something cold. 

Her coffin, wherever it was, wasn’t here. He didn’t even know where she lived. But he had a spare cot he could put in the hall, where there weren’t any windows. He’d wait for her to wake.

**Author's Note:**

> Momo Commits Murder and Kensei Cannot Stop Her


End file.
